Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s new book The Sex Lives of African Women examines self-discovery, freedom and healing. She talks about everything she has learned
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has a face that smiles at rest. When she is speaking, it is with a constant grin, one that only falters when she talks about some of the difficult circumstances she and other African women have gone through in their quest for sexual liberation. She speaks to me from her home city of Accra, Ghana, where she says “no one is surprised” that she has written a book about sex. As a blogger, author and self-described “positive sex evangelist”, she has been collecting and recording the sexual experiences of African women for more than a decade. Her new book, The Sex Lives of African Women, is an anthology of confessional accounts from across the African continent and the diaspora. The stories are sorted into three sections: self-discovery, freedom and healing. Each “sex life” is told in the subject’s own words. The result is a book that takes the reader into the beds of polygamous marriages in Senegal, to furtive lesbian hookups in toilets in Cairo and polyamorous clubs in the United States, but without any sensationalism or essentialism. Her ambition, in the book as in life, is “to create more space” for African women “to have open and honest conversations about sex and sexuality”.
Sekyiamah was born in London to Ghanaian parents in a polygamous relationship, but grew up in Ghana. Her formative years in Accra were under a patriarchal, conservative, Catholic regime that instilled in her a fear of sex and all its potential dangers – pregnancy, shame, becoming a “fallen” woman. “I remember once my period didn’t come,” she recalls. “I was in Catholic school at the time, and I would go to the convent every day and pray, because I thought that meant I was pregnant.” From the moment she reached puberty she was told: “Now you have your period, you’re a woman, you can’t let guys touch you. That was always in my head.” Later, she was told: “If you leave your marriage no one else is going to want you. If you have a child as a single woman men are going to think of you just as a sexual object and not a potential partner.” Her mother would only speak to her about sex in cautionary ways. “The idea of messing with boys was so scary to me. It kept me a virgin for years and years.”
